


Out of the Oven

by TheElusiveBadger



Series: into the desert [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Birthday Cake, Cooking, Cute & fluffy, F/M, Naboo Culture and Customs (Star Wars), Naboo Lake Country (Star Wars), Outer Rim Planets (Star Wars), Sassy Droids (Star Wars), Tatooine Slave Culture (Star Wars), The Great Galactic Bake Off, Wedding Fluff, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29491773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: Anakin and Padme cook together on their wedding night.Or, five times cooking acts as comfort, love, and tradition, and one time a tired team heads to a diner.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: into the desert [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 11
Kudos: 109





	1. Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anakin and Padme cook together on their wedding night.

Anakin flicks his hood up further over his head with his new metal arm to hide his padawan braid, his flesh hand tucked loosely with Padmé’s as she drags him down the cobblestone street. She, too, is wearing a cloak, though hers is silk and bright green, embroidered with gold blossoms, her hair completely pulled back so that no strands escape past the brimmed hood. The red cloak he’s wearing is ill-fitting on him, too tight across the shoulders, loose around the waist, and cut off an inch or two above his ankles. “It’s Darred’s,” Padmé explained when she handed it to him before they’d set off to the market. “Your Jedi robe will draw too much attention to us.” 

This market is one of the smaller ones. It’s outdoors; the wares and products display are similar, but markedly different to those more familiar to him on Tatooine. There are stalls set up with rods and propping metal holding up waterproof canopies, vendors hawking to customers next to baskets laden with fruits and vegetables, tanks with variously small and middling sized mollusks, fish, and decapods, while butchers line up at the furthest ends of the market, their large cleavers and hunks of meat hanging from hooks and wires next to their stalls. Kids play along the edge of the market, which is set in a grassy knoll next to the end of the cobblestone road. Kites fly by the edge of the bank of the river, along with various droids holding fishing hooks and nets, hard at work for fresh catches of the day. There are herb and food spice stalls, an entire machine sputtering out free fruit smoothie samples for the consumers, and, at the farthest reaches across from the butchers, the largest tent with a rounded table like an outdoors, makeshift cantina. Next to the bar, a large woman with big hair belts out a high-pitched, warbling song in a dialect of Naboo that ends words in many vowels, and rolls various sounds into a sweet murmur. 

He’s rarely been to markets like this outside of Tatooine and Coruscant. The missions he and Obi-Wan had been on in the past generally centered more on diplomacy and peacekeeping, less on the local grub. 

“Are you sure we’ll get what I need here?” he asks her, as she leads them past a stall full of ribbons, shiny powders, and gill-goat cashmere dining cloths dyed vibrant oranges, reds, and purples etched in lined patterns. Padmé reaches to touch one of them, running her fingers through the frayed edges, a contemplative look on her face. She looks at him, then to the bag he’s got strapped to his back, empty for now, before she sighs. 

“It’s the biggest market near the Lake Country,” she replies, and reaches a hand up to adjust her hood. It covers the pearled, white headpiece she’d weaved into her hair before they’d left the estate over an hour ago. “The markets in Theed would be better, but—well…” 

She lingers on that unspoken thought, then shrugs. They’d walked here, cutting through the trails that went deep into the mountainside behind Varykino, uphill then downhill, and over a bridge, to a remote island village of no more than three hundred or so inhabitants. Padmé’s long hemmed dress, flowy and bright sunshine yellow, had caught on the branches and vines of fallen tree branches and long, sharp bladed grass. At one point, Anakin had to cut her out of a thicket of thorns attached to a thick-trunked tree with needle point red leaves. Laughing, Anakin had pointed out the impracticality of his new wife’s dress, remarking that “pants wouldn’t catch on anything, angel” to no avail as they were too far out from Varykino at the point for it to matter in the grand scheme of events. Pouting, Padmé had answered, “It’s our wedding day. I want to look nice.” 

Anakin estimates they could have made it to this village in approximately fifteen minutes, with some time to spare and some mud, too, in one of those Gondola Speeders, and thinks he can even remember spotting the lights reflecting off the lake at night from one of the many balconies. A boat may have cut down the time considerably. 

But Padmé’s point about the need to be inconspicuous was a salient one. If the Jedi Council found out that _he_ had married—

Anakin shook his head. He couldn’t think of that today. 

Not on his wedding day. 

He smiles at Padmé, and holds out his hand—not the new, mechanical one, which is still stiff, tending towards freezing when he wants it to grip something and pulling at his healing, burned tendons and nerves at the crook of his elbow—but his real hand. He’s got gloves on, both against the cold and to decrease the oddness of wearing _one_ glove, but he can still feel the weight of her palm as she wraps her fingers around his with an answering smile. 

“I’ll manage,” he tells her, as they head towards a stall filled near to bursting over the seams with fruit. “I once cooked Obi-Wan a stew out of groceries we got from a remote starship repository in the Mid-Rim. Think it was only a few parsecs from here. Anyway, it was _close_ to the real thing.” 

As he takes in the fruit sellers’ wares, he bites his lip. There are round, orange fruits that when sliced bleed red juice out onto the checkered cloth, their smell citrusy and sharp. Next to them, a bumpy, oblong yellow fruit with splotches of green fill two baskets. A small, rounder version with two knobbed edges and a smoother skin— _lemons_ , he remembers from the few times he’d had them on Coruscant—take up three extra baskets. Strings of jogan fruit hang from hooks, and bushels of grapes and cranberries are tied to the posts bracketing the stall. There are small, brown fruits that remind Anakin of pallies—perhaps they are pallies, just not dried by the desert—he hopes, pointing them out to Padmé. She tosses them into a carrier bag, alongside some jogan, muja, and spiny meiloorun fruit. Then, she heads towards the shuuras, testing their ripeness. Before they leave, the owner tosses in a small, prickly fruit Anakin recalls eating with her at Varykino before—the juice had been acidic and felt like it was stripping the skin off his mouth the slower he consumed it. He wrinkles his nose as Padmé accepts it. 

“These will make a lovely tart,” she informs him. He shrugs the bag off his shoulders and holds it open for her. The accumulated produce takes up a full quarter of the bottom. 

“They better,” he jokes. “Not much room in here for much else.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Fruit is a vital part of healthy living.” 

Anakin thinks that fruit might be eighty percent of his _wife’s_ diet, but wisely keeps his mouth shut. They move on to a stall hosting vegetables, where he spends ten minutes looking at pointed, shriveled red and green chilies, mourning the rounded, brighter orange and red ones his mother used to cook into stews and sauces, before he grabs about fifteen or so. The quantity might make up for the flavour, he decides. He adds some red skinned potatoes, and long, skinny orange tubers, a large Alderanian courgette that vaguely reminds him of the white and green vegetable that his mother was given once a year when Watto was in a benign mood, before he makes a final grab for some purple onions and tomatoes. 

After throwing in parsley, garlic leaves, and tezierett seeds, Anakin leaves Padmé to search through the abundance of herbs and spices and sets off to look for h’kak beans and flour. He finds a light brown powder that _looks_ similar to the ground legume flour common in the Slave Quarters of Mos Espa, and though he doesn’t find the orange h’kak beans, he finds indented beige beans the vendor calls Nuna Peas and some green lentils. Then he gets a litre of blue milk and a jar of yogurt, before he heads back to Padmé. 

“Pad—Ver—” Anakin sighs, momentarily forgetting the fake name Padmé gave to the holy man who officiated their ceremony. She may not respond to it, anyway. He calls out “angel” instead.

“Yes, A—Set,” she says, emerging from a crowd of Gungans. Her small stature is dwarfed among them. “Got everything you need?” 

She holds out her hand again with a smile, and he takes it. It’s nice, he thinks, to be able to touch her freely. Freedom is rare for him, and he shifts with no small modicum of guilt as he thinks about how very _not free_ he truly is. Again, he shakes it away. He’s just not used to the openness of her love quite yet, though it is warm and pleasant; physical affection is rare in the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan, on occasion, gave him pats on the shoulder or ruffled his hair, but the physical aspects of Jedi training were more about fighting styles and maneuvers, or the bows, the ones that always caused the lurch in the pit of his stomach. Padmé, though, ran her hands through his hair and playful tugged on it, and curled into his side on the transport couch of the luxury cruiser that had brought them back to Naboo from the MedBay on Coruscant. 

“I do,” he replies with a smile. “Ready to head back?”

She confirms, and they set off back towards the mountain trail that leads to Varykino. 

A few hours later, Anakin stands at the edge of the lake, frowning at the sand. He can see Padmé making her way down the steep, sloping path that cuts in a zigzag from the back of the estate to the private, alcoved beach, balancing a tray tightly in her hands. He motions, lifting the tray from her to float it down, so that she can gather the scuffed ends of her dress up to avoid tears. She laughs, a tiny “Ani” floating out into the breeze, as he lays down the platter of snacking grapes and blossom wine next to the burning circle of sand he’d set. There are carved stone chairs shaped like roses, and a canopy above them, a few feet to the right, and a fussy Threepio scolding an indigent R2, who’s rightfully complaining about sand in his thrusters. 

Anakin bends down, knees locked, and uses the Force to slowly kill the flame he’d set, until there was nothing but charcoal and ash left behind. Then, he grabs the long stick he’d carried down from the mountains on their way back, some sort of elm, and flicks the charcoal over to the side. He motions for Padmé to stay by the edge where the sand drifts precariously onto the sculpted path, her mouth turned down into a confused frown, as he picks the dough he’d made, the flour grittier and less sticky than he’s used to, up from the blanket he’d grabbed off the back of one of the couches with a million pillows, and tosses it onto the hot, burning sand. Then, he flicks his hand, sweeping the charcoal from the side to cover the dough and leaving it to cook. 

“I still can’t believe you’re making bread _with sand_ ,” Padmé says, her tone perplexed. Though she’s wearing the same gown, the sleeves are inexplicably gone, and the sun shines on her bare arms. “Is this really going to work?” she asks, a teasing grin on her face. She sits on one of the chairs, her legs crossed and elbows on her knees. 

Anakin’s eyes narrow, but he smirks and moves to join her, sitting down and kicking away the sand that gathers on the top of his boot. “Wait and see.” 

They nibble on fruit while a fussing Threepio chases R2 around the beach, Padmé’s foot curled around Anakin’s ankle. They’ve pushed the chairs closer together than the two foot gap from before, so that Padmé can rest her head against his shoulder, as the sun begins to set over the reflective lake. In the distance, even through the bright haze of the setting light, Anakin sees the island Padmé used to swim to as a child, and listens to her ruminate on Naboo campfire ghost stories about sea monsters who lured unsuspecting sailors into the deep. In return, he tells her a legend of a slave who escaped into the desert after cutting out their chip, only to perish in the Jundland Wastes, but not before their last act: “—and they set a fire, dancing around it with almost no strength, fueled by their desire for revenge. The story goes that they died out there in the desert, but their family was freed, and their community rose up to kill all the masters,” he finishes, trying to remember all the minute details his mother used to whisper to him on their cramped sleeping pad in the wee hours of the long night. 

The smell of warm, slightly crisped bread begins to carry on the breeze. Anakin moves his hand, not bothering to rise from his seat. In a flash, the sand is up, the bread lifts in the air, round and bubbled and browned, before he spins it, then flops it back into the pit for a couple more minutes on the other side. 

Padmé laughs. “Is that not a frivolous use of the Force, Ani?” she teases. 

“I’m too comfortable to move.” 

Once the bread is done, and the sun has set completely in the sky, they head back inside. Anakin promises the kvetching R2 that he will get to cleaning out his thrusters tomorrow before a biohazard of sand, mud, and refuse from at least four different planets forms. Threepio inquires whether he should serve “Mistress Padmé” and “Master Ani” the evening meal, but they both shoo him away. “Do you think we should bring him back to the Lars?” Padmé asks, as two pouting droids glide off to another room. 

“When will we even get the time?” Anakin asks. “The Jedi are being drawn into the war. There’s talk of hurrying along padawan trials. And I doubt the Senate will be any less busy.” 

He feels a bit guilty for taking the droid, thinking of the lack of hands at the Lars’ moisture farm, but it will be difficult enough to keep one secret from the Order. And he doesn’t have free reign to just keep going off wherever he wants to deliver back accidentally acquired droids. 

“Maybe next time I see Sabé, I’ll send him off with her,” Padmé remarks, and then draws him over to the villa’s rotunda, the ‘Room of Morning Mists’ she’d told him once. The curtains have been changed to a brilliant gold, and she’s strung up twinkling pink fairy lights alongside the open arched windows, creating additional stars with the nighttime sky. There’s a vase of elaborate orange and red and yellow flowers in the middle of the table, shaped, somehow, like a flickering flame. Dotted around the room, too, are lanterns lit with real fire, not synthetic, and the room smells deeply of smoke and warmth. On each side of the silver bowls are obsidian carvings of the Naboo Flower of Life, while the crimson fished shaped platter that Anakin placed his mother’s Tatooine flatbread down onto was garnished with thin sticks of green and four-petaled purple flowers. 

“I’m going to go check on the stew,” he told her, then gives her a quick kiss before popping off to the kitchen to check on the stew that he’s been working on for the last four hours. He’d searched the entire estate for an old pot made of clay, before giving up and using a new, metal one. He’d tried the chili oil in the pantry, which was mild, at best, but he’d added that in along with the crackling tezierett seeds, ‘mum seeds and peppercorns, and an orange powder in the spice cabinet that _seemed_ close to the flavour he remembered from childhood. He dips a spoon in it to taste—the potatoes are soft and browned, and the tubers are just the right side of intermingled with the chilis and herbs. It’s not that _hot,_ Anakin thinks, but he remembers the last time he’d attempted to make a proper Tatooinian dish for Obi-Wan which sent the man onto an immediate quest for milk and a few hours lost in the ‘fresher. 

Anakin grabs a separate bowl for the boiled barley pearl grains he’d picked out of Padmé’s pantry to go alongside the stew. On his way out, he barely resists the urge to look inside the conservator to see the dessert Padmé’s got setting in there. He bites his lip, suddenly nervous, as he makes his way down the halls back to the veranda. _What if she doesn’t like it_ , he wonders, and then almost doubles back to grab more yogurt to tone it down, before he hears her call, “Ani? Do you need help?” 

He clears his throat, fingers tightening around the crockery. “No,” he replies. “I’m good. Be there in a second.” 

He sighs, steels himself, then begins heading to the veranda again. Padmé’s sitting with her knees crossed and an indulgent smile on her face. She’s wearing the necklace he’d carved for her ten years before, the simple, white japor snippet a stark contrast to the beaded pearl headpiece she’s wearing that drapes in a v over her forehead and gathers around some of her brown curls towards the back of her head. “I was beginning to think I’d lost you,” she teases. “And it’s only been nine hours.” 

“Never,” Anakin tells her, knowing that he meant the words as more than just a quip back to her light teasing. Hopefully, she’d never know about his lack of fr—no, she _would_ never know about that, he decides resolutely, pushing down the squirming guilt. He sets the food down to the left of the centerpiece, and then sits. 

Awkwardly, he says, “So, our first dinner. Married. We’re married.” 

He still can’t quite believe the whirlwind of the last week. 

Padmé blinks, nods, and picks up the third spoon from the left side of her plate. “We are. You don’t—regret it, do you?” 

He startles. A lump grows in his throat, and for a long moment, he wonders if _she_ regrets it. She’s a senator, a former queen, she’d grown up free on this wonderful, green world with flowers and so much water and he’s just _Anakin_ , a child from a desert nowhere who’d still be there if Master Qui-Gon hadn’t won him in that pod race. He bites his lip, and his thoughts must have shown on his face, because Padmé reaches across the table, grabs his hand and squeezes it. 

“I don’t regret anything. I want this, Ani. I love you,” she says, and he grips her hand, too, and says it back. She scoots her chair around the edge of the table, and, in practiced seconds, she has moved her placement so that they are next to each other, rather than across, looking at one another over a stacked centerpiece arrangement. 

The aroma of the stew is smokey and pungent, the fragrance of the hot chilis sharp, hitting the back of the throat long before they taste it. Anakin shows Padmé how to dip the bread into the stew of mixed vegetables like his mom did, and though her eyes widen, at first, she doesn’t cough and sputter like Obi-Wan, and they eat, exchanging childhood food mishaps about stolen bits of cake and Padmé’s sixth birthday biscuit heist with her sister, Sola, during a long, boring party with relatives so old, she jokes, they might have been around when Master Yoda was young. 

It’s the first time in a long time Anakin feels _home_. The fires create shadows that dance along the column of the wall, their shadows large in the glow of the illuminating stars, twinkling fairy lights and flickering flames. At some point, their conversation drifts and they realize their bowls have been long empty, the food gone some time ago. Padmé bites her lip, and says, “I should go get dessert.” 

“Yeah,” he replies, and swallows, hard, past the nervous lump in his throat as he watches her walk away. His fingers, his _real_ fingers, trace circular patterns on the table, and he fiddles with the utensils, lifting them up in the air, up and down, up and down, with the Force, practicing channeling it through the mechanical wires and bits of his cyber hand. 

The air is charged, tense. He thinks back to when he was fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, and Obi-Wan would disappear some nights, emerging in the morning for meditation with mussed hair and a grin. He thinks of the _datapoint display_ with diagrams and instructions he was forced to sit through, mortified and blushing, as Obi Wan confidently explained “the growing body” to Anakin, who was too scared to reply that “I really don’t need to hear this, Master.” 

He doesn’t know what to expect tonight—doesn’t know what Padmé wants. 

She emerges back into the veranda platter first. With growing amusement, Anakin watches as she tries to maneuver the large, oblong serving platform which dwarfs the width of her entire torso around the columned doorway without scraping it. He goes to help her, but she waves him off, and it’s only then that he notices, well, _it_ : the tart is round, true, but around the edges were browned, shaped bits of pastry that resemble millaflowers, dusted with sugared pearls and glittering gold. On the top of the tart, a mix of jellied fruit set in a layered arrangement of colors, the oranges, the greens, and the red, trifected into a pattern, with bits of spun sugar draped from the tops of the pastry to fall, like a canopy, over the tart. On the side, there’s the paste of pallie—no, _date_ , she’d told him—fruit he’d made in a crystalline jar, next to it a glob of whipped cream moulded into a funnel, and in another bowl, rounds of muja fruit ice cream. 

“How does it look?” she asks, placing it precariously on the edge of the table. Anakin grabs the side so that it doesn’t tip and upend all its contents on the floor, and she groans, then sweeps the bowls over to the other side of the centrepiece so that they can straighten the strangely aesthetic dessert display. “It’s a typical Naboo wedding design. My mother made this for my father, and her parents, too.” 

“It’s—” he starts to say, attempting to choose the right word. He’s _never_ seen food as elaborate, as ostentatious, as _pretty_ , even, as this, and for a maddening second, he wonders if he’s supposed to eat it or admire it. “Lovely,” he settles on, which isn’t a lie. He thinks that several members of the Jedi Council would keel over at the sight of this dessert and its extravagance. The slaves on Tatooine would never even imagine such a sight—at least, not for them and their tables. 

She smiles brightly, her eyes lighting up. “Thank you.” She quickly grabs the triangular, edged knife meant simply for tarts and pies, and cuts out a slice of pie, the fruit dripping, shiny and sweet-smelling, and then dollops the paste and the creams onto their plates, manipulating the spoons until they dot the plate like scattered hazelwood nuts. 

“All Naboo spouses make something on their first night together,” she’d told him, after the vows had been said and the holy man she’d plucked from some obscure religious order in Naboo’s mountains had left, not even heavy with credits to keep their secret, since Naboo prized privacy in all family matters. “It’s a sign of love. Devotion. Partnership.” 

The slaves of Tatooine did that, as much as they could. Unlike Naboo, Anakin remembers, from the one time he watched two slaves with different masters whisper promises to each other under the light of the three moons in a narrow space between two slave huts, it wasn’t always food. Sometimes it was water. Sometimes, it was snippets, like the japor snippet he’d carved her. Other times, it was just the act of giving each other that _moment_ , away from the masters and reality that their lives were not in their control. 

That nothing they truly wanted could be public.

Expectant, her fork hovers over her dessert, waiting for _him_ to eat. He picks up the delicate fork, smaller than usual, thinner, and sets it to the crisp pastry he thinks she made from burrmillet. 

The fruit is tart and sharp and sweet and acidic. A million different flavours burst on his tongue, and leave a stringent aftertaste. The sprinkled gold feels like he’s eating flimsy, but quickly melts down to nothing. It’s _good_ , but different. He smiles, and she grins, and then they are eating the dessert. 

At the end of the night, Threepio shuffles in with a resigned “oh, dear me” as he sweeps away the artistic tart, and the empty plates and bowls. Padmé rests her head on his shoulder again, and he holds her close, but he’s _tense_ , too, and though he hopes she doesn’t notice, he can see the wrinkle growing between her eyebrows as a frown forms. 

“Are you...alright?” she asks, her voice soft. She pulls back, her neck craned to gaze at him, and her hand sweeps back some errant locks of hair from his forehead. 

He nods, tightly, and _too_ fast. 

“Anakin, it’s fine to be nervous,” she tells him. “We don’t have to do anything right now.” 

He opens his mouth to reply, to tell her that _it's not that I’m nervous, really, angel, just that_ — _well_ — _and I really just want to hold you and be here with you._ He doesn’t know _how_ to place the complicated tumult of emotions and thoughts swirling around in his head into words. 

The silence sits there, heavy, and Anakin says nothing. 

Padmé, though, is competent enough at reading emotions, even without the Force. “Come on,” she says, and slides off the chair. “I’ve got a holodrama I want to show you. It’s my mother’s favorite.” 

She brings him into the same sitting room with the plush and overly comfortable couches and fireplace from the night, only mere weeks ago, he’d told her how he’d felt. In the distance, the waves splash heavily, a crash in the silence of the dark, and he waits, watching the flickering sparks in the fireplace, while Padmé goes to fetch R2. She’s changed into something more comfortable when she returns, a dress that hugs her upper body, bright blue and made of a thin, satiny material, and lace patterns of swirls that circle into one another, the skirt billowing out and falling to her knees. 

R2 bleeps a question, roughly translating to _did you screw up, H-1_ ? Human-One, and he doesn’t know how he’s become _one_ , now, and Padmé _two_. 

“No,” he tells the nosy droid. “Of course not.” 

Padmé raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t ask. Instead, she places the datapad on the port that allows it to project above the fireplace like a screen, and then curls up into his side, her feet resting on a pillow, and searches through old reruns of holodramas and other various channels Anakin has little familiarity with. The most that Obi-Wan watches is the news, always with a disapproving comment for various politicians and random celebrities.

“My mother watches this zealously,” Padmé tells him, as the title of the show, _The Great Galactic Bake Off_ , flashes dramatically in technicolor across the projected screen. “It’s her comfort show. It’s on season ten.” 

“It’s a show about dessert?” Anakin asks, confused, as he watches a Twi’Lek woman called Tru Kin Per quip puns about the Naboo countryside and shaak grazing, while her cohost, a bald-headed Zabrak the Twi’Lek calls Lan, acts scandalised for three seconds before she announces, with a flourish and a bow, that it is “pastry week.” 

The next hour is spent watching ten harried contestants rush around a plastent set out in the middle of a sprawling field of grass on Stewjon, peppered with round, bleating sheep, breaking ovens, two hosts, one with silver hair and a harsh face that hovers, like a Correlian fruit bat, to sneer at the amateur bakers as they attempt to produce bakes, while the other, a human woman called Mara Perry, is nicer, shriveled with age but peppy, asks the hopefuls whether they “think those flavour combinations will be something that really works?” Padmé waves her fist angrily and snipes that “he knows nothing, sweeter than Corellia? What nonsense!” as the snooty judge, Z’Les Mol-Wood, scornfully remarks that, “Naboo pastries are known for being sickeningly sweet, much sweeter than a nice Corellia tart” to a woman who hails from the same remote village as the Naberries. 

Z’Les Mol-Wood rates the participant’s muja and translucent lime tart with a “bland, and sickeningly sweet” verdict, which makes _no sense_ , not one bit, and Anakin finds himself joining Padmé with heatedly reprimanding the man through the holovid as if the strength and vigor of their disapproval can change his mind. R2 joins in, too, with a series of bleeps that are some of the worst curses Anakin’s heard this side of a smuggler ring, and Threepio tries to interject with a well-meaning, but _wrong_ , excuse of “well, he’s just doing his job. Not all the contestants can win Top Baker.” 

A Rodian woman who makes a tart that resembles a khardax, drenched with poola blossom syrup that makes the pastry glow from the bioluminescent effect, wins Top Baker for her show of creativity, while the poor Naboo woman is sent packing by the surly Z’Les Mol-Wood. 

As the credits roll, Anakin turns to Padmé. “Can we watch more?” 

She smiles, laughs, and somehow, after six episodes and, entirely without meaning to, Anakin Skywalker, padawan learner of Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi, newly married man to Senator Padmé Amidala, finds himself addicted to _The Great Galactic Bake Off_. 


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During the Outer Rim Sieges, Ahsoka hopes that Anakin can have a relaxing birthday. 
> 
> As much as anyone can relax in war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is directly following in the timeline of the series with the first chapter of defect by That_Ghost_Kristoff. It makes a few references to it throughout.

The chrono on the opposite wall from the entrance hits 16:01 just as Ahsoka enters the kitchen. Obi-Wan sits, one elbow propped on the durasteel countertop just across from the cooking appliances, and his chin in his hands. The glowpanel’s bright, fluorescent light emphasises his pale complexion, washing him out almost to the point of colourless. There’s still a bit of dirt smudged underneath his left eye, like a bruise, and an actual bruise just underneath the left corner of his mouth, which tilts upward in a seemingly half-amused, half-bemused smile. As she rounds past the long, rectangular regulation table pushed to the far side of one wall, in the corner next to the equally long, rectangular window in this sterile room, to sit next to Obi-Wan, she takes in the ingredients piled all askew towards the left side of the gray preparation countertop. On its far right side, a stack of empty pans and three small soup bowls precariously balance, threatening to tip and slide right into the cast-plast red tray of cracked eggs of unknown origin. 

Anakin’s face is set in a frown, and when she pulls her left leg up to rest her chin on her knee, she catches his eyes, and feels the wave of disgust, befuddlement, suspicion, and phantom physical nausea he’s rapidly cycling through echo across their training bond. Irritated, she narrows her eyes, and mutters, “It’s not that easy to find ingredients in a warzone, you know. I’d like to see you do any better.” 

There’s a building set for food storage three streets down. After the initial battle, once they’d taken Murkhana City and the leftover ash from downed ships and detonated explosives started to settle, the troopers went out en masse out to the shops and empty homes to salvage perishables, cans, and other foodstuffs to feed their soon-to-be-starving army. Relief from the Republic, in terms of aid and restocking of necessary provisions, was long in coming, and in the meantime, they stocked for the long wait out of the remnants of a once bustling hub. 

“So you’ve proven,” Anakin says, and delicately picks up a bottle filled with a thick, viscous liquid, black and clinging to the transparisteel edges. “I have no idea what this even is.” 

As Obi-Wan leans over the countertop, his shirt threatens to dip its fabric into the pre-whisked, pre-cracked, procured egg mess. “Engine oil?” he answers, studying the fluid—or juice, or excretion, Ahsoka’s not quite sure which—with the same expression he gives gross flora, scary bug creatures, and Dex’s five-nuna-egg omelette special with Haruunian-avonel sauce. “Or ink? Primitive ink from a bygone era in Murkhana’s history?” 

“It’s cooking oil,” Ahsoka says, indignant. Afterall, Obi-Wan’s not the one who spent seven hours looking through all of Murkhana City’s meagre resources trying to find _birthday cake_ ingredients. Under the circumstances, which include the fact that she’s never had a human or omnivorous cake, and that she needed to consult a recipe-blog that began its explanation with the ten-page life story of ‘Lana M’lia’ to settle on the usual parts of cake making: flour, rising agents, and binding foodstuffs, she thinks she did sufficiently well. She’d only had the help of Captain Rex and Commander Cody, both of whom were never offered a birthday wish from the Kamonioans, let alone a cake. Her eyes flitter over the assortment, taking stock of their findings and borrowed fare. 

There’s a cloth bag plopped at the edge of the lineup, cinched tightly shut with rough, beige twine. Flour, it turned out, was hard to come by and nowhere to be found in the piles of borrowed loot three streets away. Rex found this bag in an abandoned home on the edge of the city, which smelled like a Coruscanti lower-level sewage plant. However, the translator droid interpreted the print on one side of the bag to mean “flour,” and when they opened it up, they saw a powdered, dark brown and odorless mixture that appeared to be as it claimed. Ahsoka can’t name what plant it’d been harvested from, since many of the farms within sixty miles of the city have been left fallow as refugees fled their homes and left the city to hide in the mountains while the Republic and the Separatists continue this endless war. Rodents and insects must have gotten to most of the flour, or the inhabitants of the homes and city took the foodstuffs with them, since this was the only bag spotted within city limits. 

“It’s mould,” Anakin retorts, but she ignores his naysaying. He’d promised to make this cake in their group chat earlier, as payment for her helping polish all the starships in the hangar, and after all her effort, he’d better make the best damn birthday cake of his life. 

Instead, she continues to study the bounty. Several other procured-without-credits items loom behind the bag. There’s the flavouring agents, all lined next to one another. The spice she _hopes_ is ground van’il rests in a tiny durasteel box. Flavouring, Ahsoka found, was variable and complex. She gathers it’s dependant on taste preferences and type of cake from the dozen or so blogs she’d shuffled through four nights before, bundled under the thin blanket and squinting from the holoscreen’s dulled light, mindful not to wake Anakin, who was still recovering from his newest brush with death via-crashed starship. The preferences, however, were a mystery to her. She’d sent around a questionnaire to the 501st, listing common flavours she’d logged watching rerunning holovids of _The_ _Great Galactic Bake Off_ , in an attempt to get a workable sample of optimal combinations for the human palette. Chocolate, the only human dessert she’d tasted, was number one on the poll, closely followed by almond, van’il pod seeds, cynnamon, nut peas, and various fruit sauces, none of which appeared to have been left in the abandoned shops and domiciles. 

Glistening like newly drawn blood, the vial of essence of tomato lay flat on its side, the lid bumping against the ribbed spine of the oblong, mottled green vegetable she’d seen one prolific blogger make bread with: the courgette. The day before, Cody’d sifted through the reject pile of produce left at the food base, the ones that were suspiciously chewed. Most had been found under upturned retail stalls. The chipped wood acted as covers from the wind and battle pollution which left dust all along the buildings and lined the street with chalky sediment. When the rains came, the leftovers caked and hardened on benches and fountains, steps and columns, and solidified into the cracks of the sidewalks. 

Ahsoka shakes away the memories of the abandoned city centre, and focuses on the reflective obsidian squares of salt mined from a saltwater lake somewhere on the planet. Or so she assumes. 

A ding alerts her to a flurry of movement, briefly drawing her gaze away from her city-trekking treasure. Anakin rubs his flesh wrist with his robotic hand, face set into a grimace as he works the still healing injury, before he grabs a whisk and starts to re-whisk the separating egg in the tray. “What’s the point of that?” Obi-Wan asks. He leans back on his stool, but there’s nowhere to rest his back, so instead he’d stuck half-balanced like a stringed puppet. “They may be stale.” 

“Well, if this gives all of us a new relationship with the ‘fresher, you can thank yourself for that,” Anakin says, using his entire upper body to speed the movement of the utensil. As he does so, the tray tips on the counter, and a puddle of thick, spongy membrane slimes its way towards Ahsoka and Obi-Wan. Anakin curses, then grabs one of the small soup bowls, dumps the sloggy green mess into it, and hugs it to his chest as he begins anew with a wince. His movements are slow and sluggish, but determined to see results. “Don’t know why you even bothered. When was the last time I had a cake for this?” 

Ahsoka scowled, while Obi-Wan bit at his bottom lip, probably contemplating, then said, “You were fourteen. The Baby Yoda waited outside our rooms with two bogberry muffins. The Creche Master was beside herself when we brought him back that afternoon. Didn’t even say thank you, just grabbed him and slammed the door in our faces.”

“Is a muffin cake?” Ahsoka asks, confused more by _that_ than the Baby Yoda. She, too, had seen him once or twice, as the little bugaboo loved to scamper and hide in unsuspecting padawan and knight’s rooms. He’d shown up once outside Anakin’s door early on in her padawanship, ears folded downward and head slumped, soft snores muffled in his youngling robe. Ahsoka didn’t know how long he’d been there, but she hadn’t really thought to ask, before a creche attendant had promptly picked him up and carried him off. 

“No,” Anakin responds, at the same time Obi-Wan says, “From a certain point-of-view.” 

Ahsoka doesn’t think that the perspective of one random Jedi Master in the Outer Rim Sieges is shared by the judges of _The_ _Great Galactic Bake Off_ , but she’d hardly been taking notes on pastry type, just the complicated alchemic mix of ingredients meant to dazzle tastebuds of omnivores. Really, Ahsoka’s dietary requirements are simplistic in comparison. 

After several minutes, with a pained grunt, Anakin sets down the bowl of fluffy, bright green eggs. Near the edge, one of the stiff peaks dangles dangerously over the side and threatens to become a floating mountain amidst the sticky goo from earlier. Then, he flicks the long, freckled vegetable towards Obi-Wan and says, “Surely, I can trust you to grate?” 

“Why not? It can’t be harder than flying,” Obi-Wan responds, picking up the courgette with a studious expression, flipping it and turning it over in his hands, pressing down the pads of his thumbs into its green flesh with a _hmmm_ , before he says, “Peeled?” 

Anakin shrugs, and grabs the flour and the boxes, moving gingerly after his shoulders straighten. “Will it make a difference?” he says, voice raspier than before. Ahsoka feels a squirm of guilt build in her gut as she watches Skyguy work, remembering the recent crash and the numerous injuries not even bacta could fully heal. 

“Depends. How well was it washed?” Obi-Wan responds, tone sardonic as he grabs a small, dull knife and begins to maneuver it around the edges from the knobbly top towards the bottom in long strips. He makes quick work of it, scraps dropping onto the durasteel below his elbows, while Anakin pinches and measures and wrinkles his nose on the other side of the counter, both verbally bantering about the merits of various cooking methods. 

Not wanting to be _too_ left out, Ahsoka says, “Didn’t you once burn a pot of water, Master Obi-Wan?” He shoots her a glare, while Anakin huffs a laugh that turns into a wheeze as he places all the dry ingredients into another small bowl next to the first. Obi-Wan shoots off his classic excuse that “an assassin droid came through my window at the wrong moment! Was I supposed to let it kill me rather than let the water boil a _little_ over?” 

“We had to toss the pot,” Anakin teases back, as Obi-Wan begins to grate furiously. The massacred green veg emits a rough, acidic smell as he does, and Ahsoka wrinkles her nose and scoots her chair back from the counter. Anakin shakes his head as Obi-Wan squeezes gray, bubbling liquid from the remains of the courgette in a piece of flimsi advertising “Big Fen’s Sauna: The Local Flavour.” He grabs the desiccated black fruit that seems, to Ahsoka, to resemble a shriveled husk of its former self—she’d hoped for Nubian dates imported to the planet, but feared she’d been too ambitious when Rex had returned with bright yellow bag decorated with three suns and the label “Sunset Kissed” that falsely promised nice, purple fruit, instead of the hard dimpled pucks that toppled out onto the counter in front of Anakin. 

“Are these prunes? Geez, Snips, do you think we’re as old as Master Yoda?” Anakin says, and flicks one towards her. She dodges before it hits the tip of her left lek, then flings one back. Before it can dissolve into a miniature food fight, Obi-Wan asks whether they can incorporate the courgette water into their birthday masterpiece, to which Anakin responds with a firm no. 

“Not the vegetable either,” Anakin says, and asks Ahsoka to grab a bin. She pouts, more embarrassed at herself for getting them a _completely gone off_ courgette than anything else. She sighs, and thinks that Anakin’s birthday cake she’d hoped would give him a spark of amusement after endless repetition of war and sieges and violence was already a failure before it was even in the gasser. “It’s fine, Snips,” Anakin says, and holds his fingers up to inspect the fine grain of sharp-smelling yellow powder dusting his skin from the spice box Ahsoka’d spotted in the far back shelf of a corner shop. “Really,” he continues, “This is a nice gesture.” At Obi-Wan’s _huff_ , which Ahsoka’s not entirely sure is aimed at the cake batter or Anakin, Skyguy sighs. After a moment, he says, “I’m just not big into this day. It’s not _actually_ my birthday.” 

Ahsoka blinks, and Obi-Wan gets up to turn a dial on the gasser to _an_ appropriate temperature, and Anakin starts folding the eggs’ green albumen into the yellow-spotted brown flour in a small bowl. It’s a delicate endeavour, and it would be _almost_ funny to watch him try to work the mixture together without adding more to the mess on the counter, if Ahsoka’s mind wasn’t stuck on the last words she’d heard. 

In the hall, the sounds of trooper activity threaten to drown it out. She hears one man accuse another of stealing his blaster polish, R2’s beeps and whistles as he tries to corral the men in the barracks to some semblance of order, and Rex’s command for silence. 

It doesn’t shake the new feeling of _horrorguiltsadnessshameatiredness_ that washes over Ahsoka, and with the Force, she’s not sure where she ends and Anakin begins. 

“I’ve been your padawan for _three years_. Almost four,” she says, and scoots her chair back towards the fermented, brisk, acidic amalgamation of human consumption assaulting her heightened olfactory senses. “Why haven’t you mentioned this?” 

The first year, they’d been doing damage control after a large beast tried to make the Chancellor of the Republic his late night snack. A year later, they’d been stuck on the planet _she’d died on then brought back_ in Wild Space. This was the first one where they’d even been in a position to celebrate. 

Obi-Wan grabs a tray and starts spritzing it with non-sticking agent, while Anakin shrugs. “Didn’t think about it? It’s not like anyone’s ever mentioned celebrating _before_ ,” he tells her, tone ambivalent while shooting a sideways look at Obi-Wan. “Well, except Baby Yoda. It’s _his_ birthday. Or so Obi-Wan told me.” 

Obi-Wan sighs, and holds two fingers up to the bridge of his nose. “Anakin’s birthday wasn’t recorded,” he tells her. Dumbfounded, she looks back and forth between them, catching glimpses of Anakin’s struggle to incorporate the humiliated former fruit, and Obi-Wan’s near-accidental elbowing of other cookware dangerously close to the edge of the counter and onto the floor. “He knew the month and the year, so the Council thought it easiest to give him a birthday of someone already at the temple. That turned out to be Baby Yoda’s. Or so a creche attendant told me.” 

Ahsoka bites her lip, and feels a sharp sting of sadness run through her, the same that hits every time she’s reminded of just how awful Anakin’s past truly is. She knows she’s projecting it through the Force, cause Anakin’s eyes suddenly meet hers as he plops the revoltingly coloured black mixture onto the tray and smooths it with the back of the spoon towards the corners. “Mom tried to keep track,” he says, “but she wasn’t exactly looking at a calendar when she had me. She’d try to make something during the month, but it was only once or twice she actually was able. Watto wasn’t exactly generous with food rations.” If that’s to make her feel _better_ , it’s not working. The guilt sharpens and turns sour. As sour as the batter smells. 

Obi-Wan grabs the tray and shoves it into the gasser. “It will need frosting,” he points out, but it's a weak attempt to bring the mood back to some semblance of a jovial celebration. The outside sunlight’s turned overcast, no longer streaming yellow but cloudy gray, through the only transparisteel window in this kitchen. This kitchen is in an abandoned building large enough, and with enough technological and comms abilities, to serve as a barracks for the 501st and 212th. She can’t help but see it as a pall cast over them. Even the cake’s noisome odour reminds her of the battlefield, the sharp scent of blood on the beach and the way Anakin’d looked following the wreckage. 

They’re leaving Murkhana soon, or so they’d been told. Not for home, though. Desargorr, some Outer Rim mining planet. Soon, they wouldn’t be on this planet with its black beaches or its abandoned cities with refugees squatting up in the mountains, scared out of their homes and scattered with no warning by the invading Separatists. She thinks of Lux, suddenly, and Onderon, and Steela’s death. She’s _lost_ so many people since this war began, and only days before, she’d thought, not for the first time, that she would lose Anakin, when their bond weakened during the crash. 

Numb, Ahsoka gestures to a cast-plast bottle of thick, lumpy blue milk that Rex had secured from the bantha’s udders himself. “That’s what you can make it from, right? Or, something like it? I couldn’t find cream.” Then, with a stuttered breath on the edges of those _emotions_ she still can’t suppress, can’t push away into the Force like Master Luminara or her friend, Barriss, Ahsoka says, “I’m sorry. I was just trying to, I don’t know, give you something. It’s been such a long time since we had anything to feel nice about or to relax with. And with the accident, and the bombing at the Temple, and the sieges, I just—I _wanted_ to just celebrate, I guess.” 

She bites her lip, again, and then shudders, and brings her palms up to cradle her face, back bent over the counter. She thinks she _feels_ more than she sees the impression of Obi-Wan, hand outstretched to place on her shoulder, but she hears the steps round the counter, and then—

“Snips,” Anakin says, in the voice he used after her first command, when she’d screwed up badly enough she’d thought she’d never be trusted with anything ever again. “I understand. We’ve all been through so much. It’s not bad to just want to be a kid. Just for a little bit.” 

Ahsoka shakes her head, and thinks, a bit sardonically, that he’s not much more than a kid himself. He’d been near _her age_ when they’d met; when he’d been tasked as a General, a Knight, and an instructor with a padawan he hadn’t _asked_ for. The training bond sparks again, and then there’s a wave of something like comfort, and affection sent across, and Ahsoka drags her hands away from her eyes to settle on Anakin, not kneeling, not with his still healing lungs and ribs, but looking at her gently. “Plus,” he pretends to whisper, but it’s loud enough that people in the hall might hear, let alone Obi-Wan. “We’ll have the joy of watching Obi-Wan eat cake. And _that_ will be a sight to be captured on a holoimage.” Then, he steps back, while Obi-Wan, once again, huffs, and mutters about the audacity of former padawans. The baking cake’s taking a turn for smoky and acidic, like Alderaanian firesticks tossed into a pool of Corellian topato vinegar. Rubbing his side with his flesh hand, he continues, “And didn’t Rex and Cody help? We should get them in here. There’s enough for _all_ of us.” 

Scared at his sudden turn towards mounting enthusiasm, and still reeling from the past five minutes, Ahsoka shares a look with Obi-Wan as Anakin heads to the door, calling for Rex and Cody. When he heads back, he shoves the green-crusted whisk to her, which she takes with confusion. “You should help too. Surely, I can trust you to whip some frosting?” he asks, and then sits back on the stool, watching the chrono to count down the remaining minutes before the blackened monstrosity is removed from the gasser. 

“Never know till I try,” Ahsoka says. 

Trying, she finds, does not magically make the lumpy blue liquid into a smooth cream. After several minutes of ineffective whisking, she searches for a power spinner to do the task, which manages a frothy bubble state that enhances the floating lumps of unfiltered milk characteristic of those uninitiated to the rigours and intimate details of farm living. Anakin proclaims they’ll simply “use it as a glaze,” while Obi-Wan pulls the cake, steam shooting up from its crackling top to shroud his face. He places it onto a cooling rack, and though it's not burnt, it's as black as squid ink, onto a cooling rack. As Rex and Cody come into the room with their hands over their noses and wide, terrified eyes, Obi-Wan wipes the clinging droplets of evaporated moisture off his beard.

It looks like the worst concoction any of them will ever put in their mouths. It's certainly not _sweet_ , which she knew most desserts were meant to be. After its been cut and served on more cast-plast trays, Rex declares it “dinner, if dinner was made by a five-year-old Rodian who couldn’t reach the top of the counter,” though Obi-Wan, who’d been handed the _largest_ and thickest slice, spitefully announces that it was “the best cake he’d ever eaten” as he visibly fights to swallow each morsel. Three minutes after Rex took his first bite, Cody takes one, then fakes an allergic reaction, excusing himself to “the medbay” which really means the ‘fresher for a round with toothpaste. Anakin simply gulps his thin sliver in three bites with a half-nauseous, half-gleeful expression, before looking to her expectantly. 

“It’s got protein,” he says, with a cajoling tone. 

“Ugh,” Ahsoka sighs, and concedes that since this was all her bright idea, gives in. The cake wiggles, somehow, on the fork when she raises it to her mouth. It tastes like salty, putrid ash with a hint of hard rocks masquerading as sweet fruit. It tastes like Anakin'd cooked the black beaches outside. 

It was absolutely, one-hundred percent, in the words of _The_ _Great Galactic Bake Off_ , a nice gesture, but extremely poor execution. 


End file.
